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Qt gets a bit more independence

Qt, the cross-platform and application UI framework, formerly run by Trolltech until they were taken over by Nokia, has taken a step forward to more independence: the hosting of the project will soon move to qt-project.org, a domain owned by a non-profit foundation "whose only purpose is to host the infrastructure for the Qt project". Lars Knoll, director of Research and Development at Nokia, announced the change on the Qt Labs Blog noting that this move was solely about the infrastructure and the new foundation would not have anything to do with steering the project.

At the same time though, another announcement on the Qt blog noted that the "Qt Project", an open governance model, had progressed such that it would "be rolled out just five weeks from now". The model, which has been in development since July 2010, will go live on 17 October, a week before Qt Developer Days.

The result will be that the Qt Project will act as an umbrella organisation for the governance and development of the code while the supporting infrastructure will be managed by the foundation. The qt-project.org infrastructure will go live soon, and should appear with a wiki, mailman server, repositories and a merging infrastructure based on the gerrit code review system. The Jira bug tracker will be transferred to the foundation some time after the launch.

The new governance model will see the creation of a community of Contributors, Approvers (who can approve changes to the code) and Maintainers (who head up the work on various Qt components). Nokia staff will be taking on many of these roles and working with Qt as an "upstream project" using the same infrastructure. Many of the positions will be filled with Nokia staff, as the list of Approvers and Maintainers is based on "the current de-facto situation", though initially fifteen per cent of the Maintainers will be non-Nokia staff. Knoll hopes to see a broader base of participation develop over time.